This amalgam of three visual elements juxtaposes Scrooge's essential
isolation as a child (right) with only books for company when the other students went home
on holidays with the purity of the countryside in which the somewhat dilapidated school
was located. [Commentary continued below.]

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Commentary

The Spirit of Christmas Past (lower left) holds a sprig of holly to suggest
the evergreen or enduring nature of this childhood experience for the mature Scrooge. Of
Dickens's major illustrators, only Sol Eytinge, Jr. (1868) and Harry Furniss (1910)
have attempted to realise the enigmatic figure of The Ghost of Christmas Past. The great
originator of images for A Christmas Carol, John Leech,
represents Scrooge's former self only indirectly, through the image of
"Mr. Fezziwig's Ball", and focuses on the other two spirits.
The fault lies with Dickens's ambiguous description of this androgynous, ageless figure
(described as masculine in pronoun) who is a fusion of contraries:

Passage Realised

It was a strange figure — like a child: yet not so like a child as
like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance
of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions. Its hair,
which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face
had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long
and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and
feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the
purest white, and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was
beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular
contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the
strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear
jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its
using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its
arm.

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness,
was not its strangest quality. For as its belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and
now in another, and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure
itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg,
now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of
which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted
away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as
ever. [Stave Two, "The The First of the Three Spirits," p. 21-22]

Commentary

Since such ambiguity in the description of a character does not offer
much guidance to the illustrator, John Leech chose to depict the other spirits, even
though one might argue that Scrooge's sense of abandonment, his troubled childhood,
and his subsequent rejection by Belle as a young adult profoundly affected his moral
development, and that therefore The Spirit of Christmas
Past, as American illustrator Sol Eytinge, Jr., realised, is an important figure in
Scrooge's journey to spiritual redemption and social reintegration. In the twenty-fifth
anniversary Ticknor-Fields edition, Eytinge offers three instances of the diminutive,
girl-like figure with the conical hat, including in the book's somewhat surrealistic
frontispiece,"Scrooge's Christmas Visitors", and it is
quite possible that this interpretation rather than the stage convention of dressing the
spirit like a druid (as in the 1951 film adaption scripted by Noel Langley) influenced
Furniss's realisation.

Furniss juxtaposes a white background indicative of a winterscape with the darkened
figure of the lonely child reading a book on a school bench (a detail consistent with
such as images as George Cruikshank's
(circa 1843) of early nineteenth-century schoolrooms). Thus, although J.
A,. Hammerton, Furniss's editor, has captioned the composite illustration with Dickens's
initial description of the spirit, Furniss himself has utilised both the descriptions of
"a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weathercock-surmounted cupola" (24), the
dreary schoolhouse of Scrooge's youth, and the paragraph in which "a lonely boy was
reading near a feeble fire" (25), a picture that brings the mature, life-hardened
Scrooge to tears. The scene is important then because of its emotional impact upon
Scrooge, but even Arthur Rackham, who specialised in bizarre characters and effects, has
elected to depict the subsequent scene in which Fan comes to collect her brother and to
avoid entirely the Spirit of Christmas Past. As much as possible, Rackham focuses on
the less painful and more seasonal aspects of Scrooge's life, as when the head master
offers dubious refreshment to the young Scrooges. The sentiment that all boys should
have the opportunity to go home for the holidays occurs also in Dickens's 21 December
1850 essay "A Christmas Tree" in the "Extra-Christmas" number of
Household Words. As Hearn notes, the similarity in Dickens's description of
Scrooge's old school here and David Copperfield's in the fifth chapter of that
bildungsroman (issued serially, Monthly: May 1849 through November 1850) is not
mere coincidence, for both are reminiscent of Wellington House Academy, "where Dickens
received his brief formal education (a year and a half) before leaving at fifteen" (Note
13, p. 89). The physical setting of the school, far removed from urban pollution and
traffic, suggests Strood, Rochester, where Dickens spent the happiest part of his
childhood, when his father, John, was a clerk at the Naval Pay Office at the Chatham
dockyard.